Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Having swelled his reputation with his band The Cosmique Perfectión and the release of a visual concept album recently, Jazz Emu appears at the height of his powers, opening portentously with an allusion to Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and the invocation that he is 'The Man'.

Yet in his latest hour, Archie Henderson's reliably vainglorious muso, literally puffed up in an absurdly frilly disco jumpsuit, is breaking down the man, the myth, the legend. A full-on breakdown in fact.

With beatific, spiritual guru energy, Jazz has seized upon the lesser-expressed feeling of ‘gruntlement’, promising to make everyone in the room share his explosive joy, swiftly accomplishing venue-wide nirvana in a perfect cosmic balance between two disparate celebrities.

That's not enough for his swagger, though. In touch with his (hideous) inner child, he wants to see his followers spread the satisfaction beyond. He reheats some old material to reiterate the path by which he accomplished absolute, unmatched enlightenment, a gag good enough to be worth repeating. And in a ridiculously overblown spoof of those 'a day in the life', hour-by-hour itineraries beloved of high-achieving tech billionaires and delusional Hollywood actors, he shares the manic, multi-tasking regime that's brought him successful self-actualisation.

Evoking and retooling familiar pop culture references such as Chekhov's Gun, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and The Girl From Ipanema, his gloriously confusing TED Talk becomes a study in awkward hyper-masculinity as the aloof character suddenly becomes debilitated by actual human interaction and increasingly seized by existential panic, all to the tune of his effortlessly lounge-y, funked up pop.

Stripping back the last vestiges of his sanity, The Pleasure Is All Yours becomes a febrile waking nightmare in which Jazz's mask of control completely slips, replaced by another, unlikely one, as the show is abducted for universally unrelatable, observational stand-up. What's funniest about this inexplicable section perhaps, is that having reached a crescendo of crazy, the presentation then more-or-less slips back into its former groove, with Jazz shaken, trembling but ploughing on regardless.

Despite the character having returned to performing solo, the bells, whistles and polished production backing of this hour are a mightily impressive joke in themselves, with Henderson effortlessly harmonising countless pre-recorded visual and live, performative elements, remaining vital and alive in the room, the ratcheting up and crashing down of Jazz's fragile sense of self superbly well executed.

My sole complaint would be that by lurching from one increasingly disorientating, demented set-piece to the next, the actual music is lower in the mix and harder to get comfortable with than in recent outings for the adaptable but still slightly enigmatic character, with no standout number that you'll be humming to yourself afterwards. 

That's a minor quibble, though, for such a deeply bonkers and richly entertaining glimpse into the troubled mind of a singular, self-professed genius.

Review date: 24 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Pleasance Dome